The compilers of the lectionary handed preachers an interesting problem when they put together today’s Gospel reading, which comprises verses 16 to 19, and then verses 25 to 30 of Matthew’s Gospel, chapter 11. They skipped the section titled ‘Woes to Unrepentant Cities’. The reading begins with the conclusion --- a conclusion, not an introduction --- to the section titled ‘Jesus praises John the Baptist’, and ends with Jesus’s prayer to the Father, and then adds a few more lines. It is my task to find the thread that ties this arrangement together.
“But to what will I compare this generation? It is like children sitting in the marketplaces and calling to one another, ‘We played the flute for you, and you did not dance; we wailed, and you did not mourn.’” The “children” are offering their services as musicians and professional mourners, and they have no takers. The situation is one of a disconnect between ‘message sent’ and ‘message received’: there is no match between what is on offer and what is wanted. Jesus is using this story to say that the message of John the Baptist is not being heard. Just before today’s reading, Jesus says, “Let anyone with ears, listen!” The example of the children in the marketplace makes the point that people aren’t really listening, aren’t really getting what John is about. Jesus says, “For John came neither eating nor drinking, and they say, ‘He has a demon’”. In other words, they totally miss the point. They miss the point about Jesus too, and ignore the total contradiction that their remarks reveal: “The Son of Man came eating and drinking, and they say, ‘Look, a glutton and a drunkard.’” The situation that emerges from these lines is one of inattention, confusion, spiritual deafness, in fact a refusal to open up to the spiritual reality before the people in the marketplace.
It is significant that Jesus locates this story in a marketplace where children are the main characters, and where the goods on offer, so to speak, are dancing and mourning. We may think of dancing and mourning, flute playing and wailing, as representing opposites of our experience: carefree celebration, joy, freedom at one end, and at the other end, awareness of death. In a marketplace, that is, in all the busy-ness and routines of daily life, we can ignore, even forget for a while, both dancing and mourning, flute playing and wailing. But the children, as children often do in their guileless way, remind us of the truth of our experience, that even in the marketplace we are not far from dancing and mourning, from flute playing and wailing, from freedom and the reality that limits it. And Jesus confirms the truth of this when he says, “Wisdom is vindicated by her deeds.” Some ancient manuscripts say, “Wisdom is vindicated by her children.” Reality, in other words, is not far away, even in the marketplace, where we go to avoid it.
As I mentioned, today’s reading skips over the section called ‘Woes to unrepentant cities’, woes which the cities will experience because they ignore the ‘deeds of power’ done in them. This section reinforces the point that Jesus makes earlier in the chapter. “Let anyone with ears, listen!” as he says. The cities ignore deeds of power, the same way people in the marketplace ignore the children.
Jesus turns to his Father in prayer, in words that seem to contradict what he has said so far. “I thank you Father...because you have hidden these things from the wise and the intelligent and have revealed them to infants;” infants now, not just children in the marketplace, are getting the message. Jesus has just been urging people to listen, and is now apparently thankful that they aren’t. We may rightly ask, what is going on here?
Jesus is saying that the wise and the intelligent need to rediscover the openness and immediacy of perception that children often have, before they, the wise and the intelligent, will be ready to hear, to perceive what the Father will reveal. When the Father hides a truth from humans, it is to prod us into letting go whatever would prevent us from perceiving it. The goal is not to drop wisdom and intelligence, but to prepare for new depths and new connections. Just as the minds of children are constantly developing new connections, so must the wise and the intelligent not imagine that spiritual growth has ceased, that new growth is not possible.
And what does the Father reveal? Jesus says, “All things have been handed over to me by my Father, and no one knows the Son except the Father, and no one knows the Father except the Son and anyone to whom the Son chooses to reveal him.” This is one of many statements of what our religion is about. In this case, it is about knowing the Father through the Son. This “knowing” is not a doctrinal statement, a form of words, an idea about which we may have opinions, but a living experience, in which we participate in the divine life, as members of the Body of the Son, who has incorporated us into himself in baptism, and who is transfiguring us in the eucharist into his mystical Body. And in fact the Son chooses to reveal the Father to everyone, as it says in John’s Gospel, “The true light, which enlightens everyone, was coming into the world.”
Jesus goes on to say, “Come to me, all you that are weary and are carrying heavy burdens, and I will give you rest.” One burden we can lay down, so that we can rest in Christ, is the burden of the marketplace, all the busy-ness and distractions and routines of life that we use to avoid both the dancing and the mourning that the children, the infants, remind us of. Jesus invites us to lay down that burden, and to take up another, much lighter one. He says, “Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me...for my yoke is easy, and my burden is light.” His yoke, his burden, is participation in his life, which is what “knowing the Father” means, both now and in eternity. Amen. (8-9.VII.17. Adv.)
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